Drupal Modules: PathAuto

Sunday, August 16, 2009

PathAuto is an elegantly simple module. It lets you create automated alias rules so that your URLs remain relevant and seo friendly based on node types. For example, on this site I have pathauto setup to create a /blog/title-of-post. More correctly I have pathauto setup to create /blog/title_post by using its built in mechanism for omitting certain words from the automated URL alias.

Relevant URLs

This means that the URLs describe the pages they lead to and it's perhaps one of the most important things you can do to organize your website. Clean and relevant URLs are crucial for the simple reason that they make it easier for users to remember and/or predict the URL structure of your site. How often have you gone to a site and seen a url like this: www.bleen.net/tools/fd3ac321e4.php? What will I see if I click a link to that page? How about www.bleen.net/blog/drupal_modules_pathauto?

SEO Friendly

Everyone wants to know the exact secret sauce that will get their page to teh top of google and bing and yahoo (oh, my!) but unfortunately there isn't one. There are quite a few generally accepted guidelines you can follow to improve your chances and clean URLs is high up on that list. Here is a quote directly from the Google SEO Guide:

Improve the structure of your URLs - Try to use words in your URL. - URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them. Don’t use lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs.